Tag Archives: make money online

Business

Can You Make Livable Money Online?

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Over the years on this blog I’ve talked about how I’ve made money here and there. I’ve tried a lot of things, some successful but most of them not. Because of this, I want to address the topic of making money online because it’s a major industry, lots of people talk about it, but you need to understand how insecure it can be.

5.
Dfardin via Compfight

Let’s get the first question out of the way; can you make money online? Yes you can. Let’s address part two of the question; can you make enough money online to live on? That one isn’t so easily answered.
Continue reading Can You Make Livable Money Online? →

Business, Web Stuff

Basic Ways People Make Money With Their Websites

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Whether you have a business website or are trying to make money off the web, invariably just being online offers you the opportunity to make money in some fashion. Many people have an idea of what making money online means to them, but it’s often a limited view, which you’ll see if you visit “make money” websites or blogs. I’m going to give you some of the basic ways that people make money, whether directly or indirectly, and a general idea of how it’s done; I’m betting most of you know these ways already.

Pretty Penny
JD Hancock via Compfight

One, you can make money by selling products. This is the easy one that most people think of, as you can sell products you make or products someone else makes. Affiliate marketing works well for some people who have niche blogs or websites.

Two, you can make money by selling services. You find this more often with people that offer coaching, counseling or consulting services.

When you think of this model, you have to think both short term and long term marketing. For instance, if I have a link up it means I’m trying to sell short term services; not necessarily that I’m hoping you’ll only use me once and go away, but these are immediate services that I want to be paid up front for.

When you have a business website and you provide services, most probably you’re working on long term services, which doesn’t mean you only offer services that last a lifetime, but are looking to build your authority and presence over time so that you can become known as an expert and thus charge more for your services.

Three, you can make money by accepting advertising. Within this model you can include things like Google Adsense and other pay-per-click (PPC) or pay per subscriber/buyer models. If you have a business website you should think long and hard as to whether you want any type of advertising on your site because there’s the potential of you sending people away. However, if you have other sites like blogs that don’t talk about business specifically, accepting advertising is a great way to build income, but you have to be cautious in how you do it.

Advertising can also take other forms. If you write a blog on a certain subject you’ll often have someone ask if they can pay for a link on an article that pertains to what they do. That’s one of the powers of being a prolific writer; there’s always someone willing to pay for some authority to link back to their site. Being known as a publisher or content curator of original information can pay well.

You need to evaluate your business to determine what your websites goals are. If you’re highlighting your business, then stay away from many forms of advertising. If you’re somewhat flexible, there are lots of options you can explore.
 

Affiliates

Affiliate Programs Iā€™m Connected With ā€“ Part Four

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The best part of writing a series like this is that you have built in links to previous posts that you can take advantage of, and that others can go back to see what they might have missed. So, here’s part one, part two and part three, and now we push on to part four.


by Debbie Kerr via Imagekind

Share-a-Sale is a program like Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network and Linkshare in that they have multiple online programs you can advertise for. The main reason I joined was because I wanted to be able to highlight images like the one on this blog through the Imagekind site.

I thought I might make some money from it, but it just hasn’t ever happened. I’ve only ever signed up with a couple other programs there, but I have to admit that other than the images I haven’t really worked hard to market any of the others. So, no dollars, and just a few clicks over the years.

Chitika is a pay-per-click program like Adsense that offers ads that kind of look like Adsense. Something else they offer you is the opportunity to have them set up to only show to people who come to your site via search engines, where if people click on those ads you earn more money, but you supposedly won’t upset your normal visitors by seeing those ads.

I have made $6.16 through 3 years with the program. I finally discontinued using it because it just seemed like it wasn’t going to get the job done. I had it on 3 different websites over the years, and that’s all I’ve made; not impressive is it? I still have it on one of my websites, and in the last 30 days I made a penny; sigh…

Bidvertiser is also a pay per click program with ads that look like Adsense. As you’re noticing, there are programs that mimic the look of Adsense if you’re ever banned, and it’s possible that you might be able to make some money from it if you set it up that way. If I thought those ads would work on this blog, where I did run it once, I’d have it up since Google banned Adsense from it. However, over the years I’ve only made 85 cents total, and I’m presently running it on my finance blog.

The final program I’m going to talk about today is much different than the others. Voxant Newsroom is basically a video of whatever type of news stories you want to show on your blog or website. If someone clicks on it to watch the video, you earn money. I had thought this would be a great addition to my finance blog so I ran it there for about 6 months. I made 3 cents, and that was that. However, I want you to see what it looks like, so I created a news feed below, which is local Syracuse NY news from one of our local stations.

It’s possible that if it’s put in the right place you might be able to make some money from it. Though I haven’t used this in a very long time, it’s possible that I might add it to one of my other sites, even this one, one day.
 

Affiliates

Affiliate Programs Iā€™m Connected With ā€“ Part Three

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Hi Y’all. We’re talking affiliate programs that I’ve used and tried to make money with over the years in these last few posts. We’ve had part one and part two and now we move to part three; hold on to your seats.

Clickbank is one affiliate programs I’ve never specifically written about, hence no link to an article I’ve written. Clickbank is a program that you see a lot of big time internet marketers talking about all the time. They say they create programs, then set it up with Clickbank to help them market their products by allowing us to find products on their site to market, as publishers with their landing pages. There are some nice products there, but a lot of junk as well I have to say. I did purchase one product from them that I liked, 20 Ways To Make $100 Per Day Online, that I thought was pretty good and I marketed that thing for a long time on this blog.

And this is where things fall apart for me. According to them, I’ve never had any clicks on any of the products I’ve marketed from them, and I’ve never made a single dollar. I find that hard to believe, but it’s why I decided a long time ago I wasn’t going to market anything else they offered except for the book I’ve given the link to above. A month ago I finally removed that product from my sidebar as well; I guess just having me think it was great didn’t translate to anyone else. But over 5 years I haven’t been credited with a single sale. Maybe others have had better success than me; can’t tell you.

Solutions Medical is an affiliate program that I hooked up with to market medical billing books through my medical billing site, which I talked about on the part one post. Unfortunately, it’s another affiliate I’ve never made a single dollar from, although they do show some clicks here and there.

TTZ Media is an interesting little affiliate program in that it can highlight certain types of ads that you can put wherever and the products will rotate. You can pick one product or many products and change colors as you want to. Below is an example of the types of ads you can create:

According to TTZ, I’ve had almost 2,000 clicks over the years, but I’ve never made a single sale. Once again, it’s a program that I didn’t use a lot, but did have it on some of my other sites here and there, as well as popping it into a blog post every once in awhile. So, once again, I can’t tell you how well they pay or what payments are like. I can see how this might work for some people, but it’s never worked for me.

J-V Network is a lot like Clickbank. What you do is look through the tons of offers they have and sign up to help promote and market that program. I actually did a test with something called Tweet My Blog, which I had on this blog as the first program I used to send my blog posts to Twitter, which was neat except I couldn’t get rid of its marketing on my blog itself. That is, if anyone clicked on the link in Twitter they came to the blog and had a large banner ad at the top of the blog that obscured even the title of this blog.

Anyway, I had that post above and I heard from 3 people who said they’d added it to their blogs as well. When I went to check my stats it didn’t show I’d had any clicks, which of course means it showed me as not making any money from those sales. That was disappointing and I wrote them, but never heard a single thing back. I’ve never gone back to try it again, and I’m not sure I will. I do still get email every once in awhile from someone that’s created a new product that they’d like help marketing, but I’m just not in the mood for now.

There you go, 4 more affiliate programs I’ve dealt with. And there’s still more coming; well, you asked. šŸ™‚